Opinion

Each year parents have the opportunity to be elected as a parent representative for the HCHS School Based Decision Making Council (SBDM).

The council is composed of the principal, three teachers and two parent representatives.

It’s been awhile since I was able to spend Christmas with both parents and my siblings.

Since coming to Henry County we’ve been deterred by weather and ill-timed car problems.

You see, it’s about a four-hour drive to get to my dad’s home in Western Kentucky — there’s no direct route, and the path is easily made treacherous by the slightest amount of snow.

Mom’s place is only about 2.5 hours away, a much easier trek, mostly by interstate.

The story on NPR Tuesday morning left me shaking my head.

At the heart of the story was the question of whether or not print, specifically in this case the printed book, is dead, and how that will impact book stores large and small, chain or independent.

Call me a luddite if you wish, but I refuse to believe that the physical book will ever really die.

Raised in a household of readers, I grew up surrounded by books. A home is not a home for me until the bookshelves are up and laden with books.

Nestled in southeast Henry County in the village of Bethlehem is a treasure – the little Bethlehem post office. And yes, I am prejudiced, but perhaps less because I happen to live in Bethlehem than because of the hustle and bustle that I have experienced in big-city post offices, such as New York, Washington, Philadelphia, Baltimore and, most recently, Louisville.

If you visited our Website over the weekend, you may have noticed something different.

It was a brief, unintentional unveiling of our new platform. As the platform wasn’t supposed to debut until Dec. 4, the old website was put back up almost as soon as we noticed the faux pas.

There’s no denying that our soon-to-be old website left quite a bit to be desired. In fact, we were more than a little embarrassed by it. It was not the professional product we wanted to deliver to you.

Christmas is a time for joy, but for hundreds of Kentucky children who are victims of abuse and neglect, Christmas joy depends on the generosity of people like you.

Sunrise Children’s Services provides care for over 500 of these children across Kentucky and we need your help in making their Christmas a little brighter this year. Your donation can help provide children and teens with a few simple toys, needed clothes, and other presents that they’ll get to open on Christmas morning.

When we think of state and local governments, it is certainly understandable that much of our focus is on elected offices.  They are the ones, after all, that ultimately decide the direction the Commonwealth takes.

But that should not underscore the critical importance of literally hundreds of quasi-government boards and agencies that range from the large – like the Kentucky Lottery Corporation – to such smaller ones as water, fire and library districts.  They, too, touch our daily lives, often in ways we may not even realize.